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W H AT ’ S N E W I N POWERPOINT 2007 You already use PowerPoint for lesson materials and lectures, but there is a newer version available and your department insists that you use it. Now what?

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The Ribbon Office button Quick Access toolbar

Tabs

Good news! Once you get used to the new layout, you’ll love its intuitive architecture. And there are a number of new features that will make your professional life easier. In a nutshell, the new features fall into five categories: • • • • •

The Ribbon Mini toolbars Live View and the Gallery New graphics tools Modified collaboration tools

THE RIBBON The most striking change in Office 2007 is the arrangement of tools and commands. All tools are represented as icons and are grouped within a wide blue strip at the top of the window. This strip is called the Ribbon. If you don’t recognize an icon, mouse over it and its name will appear. The Ribbon has three parts: the main toolbar, with tabbed sections and related tools; the Office button; and the Quick Access toolbar.

Tool Group Launcher

Tool Group

Note: If you can’t find the formatting tool you want, try right-clicking the text or object. The last item on the dropdown list is Format (font, paragraph, image, etc.). When you click this, the old formatting window opens, and it still has the commands in familiar places.

| INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, Faculty Assistance Center for Teaching www.fact.usu.edu

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The Office button often surprises new users; it looks like a logo (in fact, it is a logo), but it links to commands from the old File menu. The Quick Access toolbar is so small and unassuming that it is easily overlooked. However, it is a customizable menu, designed to hold your most often-used commands and therefore save you the time and effort of hunting for them every time you need them. Click on the down arrow at the right to add your favorite items. Aside from the Quick Access bar, how do you find what you need? Here are a few things to keep in mind: Menus are now context-sensitive instead of always being viewable (and often greyed out). Relevant menus appear when something is selected. For example, if you click on an image, the image formatting options appear. When text is highlighted, there is no need for image formatting commands, so they are not displayed. Instead, text options appear.

The Office button’s drop-down menu.

Clicking on the Quick Access menu’s down button opens a list of commands that you can add to the menu.

Third- and fourth-tier tools used to be found as you drilled down through menus. Now they are often found in the right-click menu. For example, if you want to change the color and font of Word Art, right-click it and select the appropriate command from the drop-down menu that appears. The Ribbon does not have the old File, Edit, etc. menus. Instead, it has even higher-level ones; think of these as "global" tool groups: •

Home: has many of the old tools, displayed according to context.



Insert: to insert objects from a wide variety of programs and places.



Design: where you set the document’s orientation and theme.

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Animations: a new, more organized home for the animation tools.



Slide Show: again, a new look for the old tools. Nothing particularly new here.



Review: for the collaboration crowd. Track changes, check spelling, make comments.



View: myriad ways to view your presentation.



Add-Ins: where tools reside that tie in to other software, such as Breeze and Camtasia.



Acrobat: a tie-in to Adobe Acrobat, so that you can create .pdf documents.



Format: only appears upon clicking a graphic. Here (logically enough) you can format the clicked object. The menu is context-sensitive and only has commands for the type of object that is selected. Remember, this is only for graphics. Text formatting appears in the Home menu.

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Moving your mouse upward and to the right makes the “ghost” menu opaque and functional.

MINI TOOLBARS One of the coolest features of Office 2007 is the mini toolbar. When you select text, a “ghost” of a toolbar appears above and slightly to the right of the selected object. When you move your mouse up and to the right, this small menu becomes opaque and functional. This toolbar has the most commonly used text editing tools. Yes, these are available in the Home menu, but the mini toolbar keeps them right at your fingertips.

The right-click menu of a Smart Art object. Because the object has text, a mini toolbar also appears with text editing options.

| INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, Faculty Assistance Center for Teaching www.fact.usu.edu

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LIVE VIEW/THE GALLERY One of the joys of PowerPoint is the ability to employ a wide variety of graphics within a presentation. Microsoft has integrated its Live View search tool with Office 2007. This means that when you choose Insert > Clip Art, you have the option of choosing something from your hard drive or Microsoft’s site. The Gallery opens and helps you find exactly the image you want. For more information, go to

Smart Art makes ordinary text vibrant and memorable.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom /factsheet/LiveSearchFS.mspx.

N E W G R A P H I C S F E AT U R E S Microsoft has created an additional graphics gallery called Smart Art. These are graphics designed to help you make text fun and interesting – colorful charts, funky bulleted lists, and on and on. With the ability to change color, size, and layout, the possibilities are well, not endless, but definitely large. To see a demonstration of Smart Art’s text transformation, go to http://office.microsoft.com/enus/help/HA101983081033.aspx?pid=CL100605 171033. Long URL, but worth seeing.

Another way to liven up text is to convert it to Word Art or apply a text effect. Just select your text and choose Format > Text Effects or Format > Word Art Styles. You will be given another large selection of looks to brighten your slide. If you want to change the look of a graphic, select it and choose Home > Quick Styles (in the Drawing tools group). A style gallery opens with lots of fun choices. Perhaps the biggest time-saver in the new version is Themes. These allow you to apply a pre-scripted set of design elements | INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, Faculty Assistance Center for Teaching www.fact.usu.edu

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to your presentation to give it a unified look and feel. You can create your own or use one of the many provided in the software and on Microsoft’s site. Just choose the Design tab, then click on one of the themes presented within the Themes group. To change the appearance of text within a theme, select the Colors, Fonts, or Effects buttons and choose your favorite. Another fun feature of any editing tool is Live Preview. Select any object or text and choose the type of modification you want to make. When you mouse over the editing choices, those choices are temporarily applied to the selected object. For example, if you want to change the color of a Smart Art illustration, click on the item and choose Smart Art Tools > Design > Change Colors. As you mouse over the choices in the Change Colors menu, a preview of each choice displays in your presentation. One of the most exciting new graphics features for faculty is the ability to create a presentation from a set of images – and you can do it with a single tool. Choose Insert > Photo Album and navigate to your graphics folder. Select it and choose which images to use. Click Import and PowerPoint will create a new file with one image on each slide.

The Themes menu can be expanded by clicking the More button

Mouse over each theme to see a preview applied to your slide.

C O L L A B O R AT I O N T O O L S By nature, materials created in PowerPoint will be shared with others. There is now a way that you can share your entire file without fear of accidental modification: use the Mark as Final command. Simply click the Office button, then choose Prepare > | INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, Faculty Assistance Center for Teaching www.fact.usu.edu

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Mark as Final. This locks the file so that it can be viewed without change. To toggle the lock feature and unlock the file, select Office button > Prepare > Mark as Final again. Another new collaboration tool is the ability to save handouts as a Word document. To do this, click the Office button, then choose Publish > Create Handouts in Microsoft Office Word. You’ll be prompted to select a page layout. Next, you need to choose the slides to add to the new file. Choose Add Slides to Microsoft Office Word, then select Paste or Paste Link. Click OK and you’re done.

| INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, Faculty Assistance Center for Teaching www.fact.usu.edu

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